April Fool? The good, bad and indifferent

The Volkskrant has a raft of April Fools and the best of the bunch is the dream job offered by Dutch railway company NS who advertised for a backpacking researcher to travel to Iceland, Surinam, Malta and Nicaragua. 750 eager travellers applied. Unfortunately, none of the countries mentioned has a railway.

Next up was the school which told parents to fill their children’s lunch boxes with raw vegetables, a much healthier option, didn’t the parents agree? One child got so upset the teacher spilled the (raw) beans before the children could turn up with lunch boxes filled with crunchy broccoli.

More vegetable themed April Fools at porn site pornhub. It changed its name to cornhub and showed ears of corn in all sorts of compromising situations with lewd texts such as ‘She goes crazy for his salty taste’.

A decent April Fools effort was made by Coolblue. It made a video calling on people to make their homes available as a ‘mini stockroom’ so customers can collect goods within 30 minutes of ordering them. A woman already in the scheme warns potential takers to be clear about opening hours: ‘I had a neighbour round here at 1.30 in the morning’.

One that must have had many parents pricking up their ears was the child-chipping device for sale at Media Markt. Chip your child and your phone will tell you exactly where he or she has run off to. We are betting that the time for the real Easy Chipper is not a million years away.

Culture and science museum Museon sent a press release that had no one fooled: it claimed to have a unique skeleton of a giant shrew of some 200 million years old.